Opinion: In my View - Save the health visitors

But this 145-year-old tradition of community nursing is facing a bleak time, with job losses, recruitment freezes and cuts to training places for future health visitors.

But according to government policies since 1997, this crisis in health visiting should not be happening. Not since the Attlee government of 1945 have ministers announced such an array of family-orientated social welfare initiatives. Billions more in real terms has been poured into the NHS over the past decade.

Yet research from Unite/Community Practitioners' and Health Visitors' Association shows that one health visitor is being lost every day and that training places for them have been axed by more than 40 per cent in the last two years.

The gulf between Government rhetoric and the daily experience of our members is enormous - some CPHVA members have more than 1,000 children under the age of five on their books.

Health visitors are in the frontline when it comes to supporting families, providing parenting advice, assisting with postnatal depression, and, in the worst cases, detecting child abuse. We are already hearing of examples of the negative effect the cuts are having on children. Health visitors report they are finding more children being excluded from nurseries due to violence, more children being referred late for developmental delays or late diagnosis. The most devastating impact may be seen in 20 years' time, when the current crop of ministers have long been in retirement.

Unite/CPHVA calculates that 4,000 more health visitors are required immediately to help the country's 120,000 most vulnerable families.

To fulfil our aim of ensuring every child matters, we need the help of other health professionals, politicians, and early years practitioners, as well as the general public.

- Dave Munday is a trained health visitor who now works as professional officer for Unite/CPHVA.